Bobby Wilson
Use Proton Mail if you care about stopping your email provider reading your mail. Gmail is the better product in most practical ways, with far more free storage and better search, but Google holds the keys to your mailbox. Proton’s zero-access encryption means it cannot decrypt your stored messages at all.
The short version
I use both. I pay for Proton Unlimited and use Proton Mail every day, and I still keep a Gmail account.
Gmail is an excellent email service. I find its search considerably better, its free storage is fifteen times larger, its spam filtering is mature, and it connects directly to Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail without extra software. If I were scoring this on features alone, I would put Gmail well ahead.
But Gmail is not built to keep Google out of your mailbox. Google encrypts your mail in transit and while it is stored, and Google manages the keys. Proton uses zero-access encryption, which means Proton does not hold the key needed to read the contents of your stored mailbox. Messages between two Proton users are also automatically end-to-end encrypted, meaning they are encrypted before they leave the sender’s device and can only be decrypted by the recipient.
That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. Google’s protection is a policy: it decides what it does with mail it is able to read, and it currently decides not to use it for advertising or to train its AI models. Proton’s protection is architectural: it does not hold the key to your stored message bodies and attachments. A policy promise and a technical restriction are different kinds of protection, and only one of them survives a change of management.
So: if privacy is any part of why you are asking, use Proton. If it genuinely does not bother you that a large advertising company is technically able to read your email, Gmail is one of the best products on the internet and there is no shame in staying.
| Proton Mail | Gmail | |
|---|---|---|
| End-to-end encrypted | Yes, between Proton users | No |
| Can the provider read your mail? | Not stored bodies or attachments | Yes, technically |
| What a warrant gets | Metadata and records, not readable content | Records and content, with valid process |
| Free storage | Up to 1 GB | Up to 15 GB, shared |
| Search | Weaker in my use | Stronger |
| Works with Outlook or Thunderbird | Paid plan plus Bridge | Yes, directly |
| Custom domains | Yes, on paid plans | Workspace only |
| Wider ecosystem | Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN, Pass | Calendar, Drive, Docs, Meet, Chat |
Gmail wins more rows than Proton does. I still recommend Proton, and the rest of this page explains why the rows it wins matter more than the rows it loses.
Can Google actually read your emails?
Yes, technically. But not in the way most articles claim, and the accurate version is more useful than the myth.
Google is explicit: “We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.” It stopped using consumer Gmail content for advertising personalisation in 2017. Adverts you see are based on other activity on your signed-in Google account, not the contents of your inbox. Google also stated in April 2026 that it “does not train its foundational AI models, including Gemini, on your personal emails”.
Both of those are true, and any comparison still telling you Google scans your inbox to sell ads is years out of date. If we want you to trust the rest of this page, we should be honest about that first.
The real issue is different. Google encrypts your mail, but Google holds the keys, so Google is able to read it. Everything above is a policy choice about what Google does with that ability, and policy choices change with management, business models, shareholder pressure and law. The capability never goes away.
And plenty of automated processing does still happen. Google’s privacy policy says it collects content you create, upload or receive, explicitly including email, and that automated systems analyse that content to provide features and detect abuse. In practice that covers spam and malware filtering, inbox categorisation, Smart Compose, Smart Reply, summary cards, Calendar events created from your mail, personalised search, and Gemini summaries and drafts. A machine doing the reading rather than a person does not change the underlying position: Gmail is not built to keep Google out. Our guide to whether Google reads your Gmail goes through that distinction in more detail.
One useful detail if you are in Europe: Google says smart features are off by default for users in the European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Google does not make a single universal statement about defaults elsewhere, so it would be wrong to say Gemini is switched on for everyone everywhere.
Gmail is encrypted, but not end to end
All Gmail messages use Transport Layer Security, or TLS, automatically. TLS helps protect a message against interception or alteration while it travels between compatible mail systems. Google also encrypts your mail while it sits on its servers, which is called encryption at rest.
Both are worth having, and neither stops Google itself reading the message, because Google manages the keys. Ordinary consumer Gmail is not end-to-end encrypted.
Google does offer client-side encryption, where content is encrypted in your browser with keys the customer controls, making it unreadable to Google. That is only available on selected Google Workspace editions, the enterprise, education and frontline plans. It is not a feature of a normal free Gmail account. Since April 2025, eligible organisations have been able to send such messages to outside recipients, including personal Gmail users, so it is now too broad to say Gmail has no end-to-end encryption technology at all. It remains entirely accurate to say a normal consumer Gmail account does not give you end-to-end encrypted email.
Gmail’s Confidential Mode is not an answer to this either. It lets a sender set an expiry, revoke access, require a passcode and restrict forwarding, copying, printing and downloading. Those are access controls affecting what the recipient can do in the Gmail interface. Google does not document it as end-to-end encryption, it does not make the message unreadable to Google, and Google warns it cannot stop someone taking a screenshot.
The Workspace Experiments exception
Worth knowing before you opt in to anything: Google Workspace Experiments is a voluntary testing programme where participants may allow Google to collect prompts, referenced email content, Google-selected emails, generated output and feedback for product development. Google says that material may be read, rated and annotated by human reviewers, retained for 18 months, with reviewed or annotated copies kept for up to four years.
That is not the standard policy for every Gmail user, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. It is opt-in. But the data use is materially broader than normal Gemini in Gmail, so it is worth understanding before you join.
Verdict on privacy: Proton, clearly.
What happens if someone asks for your emails
This is the sharpest difference between the two, and it is where the “will not” versus “cannot” distinction stops being theoretical.
Neither service makes you anonymous. Both companies comply with valid legal orders. What differs is what an order can actually produce.
Google’s own legal-process documentation sets out the tiers. A subpoena compels basic subscriber registration information and certain IP addresses. A court order compels non-content records, such as the To, From, CC, BCC and timestamp fields of your emails. A search warrant compels the contents of communications: your actual email messages, documents and photos. Orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act can compel stored content from Gmail, Drive and Photos too. Google can do all of this because it holds the keys.
Proton is subject to Swiss law and complies with binding Swiss orders. It can hand over account metadata, an optional recovery address, payment records, sender and recipient information, subject lines, and it can be ordered to start logging the IP address used by a specific account from that point forward. Proton is not a shield against law enforcement and should never be sold as one.
But Proton’s own transparency report says it has no means to decrypt properly encrypted emails. Zero-access encryption means it cannot produce readable copies of your stored messages, because it cannot decrypt them itself.
So the honest summary: a valid US search warrant can compel Google to disclose the Gmail content it holds. A binding Swiss order compels Proton to disclose the records and metadata it holds, but not readable copies of message content it has no means to decrypt. Neither hides you. One cannot be made to produce your messages.
Verdict on legal exposure: Proton, and it is not close.
Is Proton pointless if everyone you email uses Gmail?
This is the strongest argument against switching, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge.
The objection goes like this: Proton’s end-to-end encryption only applies between two Proton users. Almost nobody you email uses Proton. So the moment your message lands on Gmail’s servers, Google reads its copy anyway, and you have paid for nothing.
The first part is true. Send an ordinary email from Proton to a Gmail address and it is not end-to-end encrypted. The recipient’s provider receives a readable copy and there is nothing Proton can do about that, because that is how email as a protocol works. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
But “you lose virtually all the benefit” is overstated, and here is why. Your copy still sits in your Proton mailbox under zero-access encryption. Proton cannot read your archive. A warrant served on Proton cannot produce it. Everything you have ever sent and received stays unreadable to your own provider, which is emphatically not true of a Gmail archive. The person you emailed made their own choice about their provider. You have not made it for them, and you have not made it for yourself either.
There is also a practical answer. Proton supports OpenPGP for encrypted mail with anyone else using a compatible PGP setup, and password-protected messages for recipients who use neither. Both are more effort than sending a normal email, and most people will not use them daily. But for the handful of messages where it genuinely matters, the option exists.
The honest position: Proton protects your mailbox, not the entire internet. If your threat model is “I do not want a company able to read my correspondence,” Proton solves that. If it is “I want every message I send to be unreadable to everyone but the recipient,” no email provider solves that, and you want Signal.
Privacy is not the same as security
One thing worth clearing up, because it gets muddled constantly.
Proton’s clearest advantage is protection from provider access, not protection from attackers. Your account security still depends on your password, your two-factor authentication, your recovery settings and the security of your device, and that is true on both services. Both support two-factor authentication and physical security keys, and Google offers additional protections such as passkeys and its Advanced Protection Programme for people at higher risk.
So switch to Proton because you do not want your provider able to read your mail. Do not switch expecting it to stop your account being broken into, because that job is still yours.
Where Gmail genuinely wins
Privacy is not the only thing that matters, and Gmail is the better product in several ways that will affect you every single day. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not used both.
Free storage. A free Google account gets up to 15 GB, shared between Gmail, Drive and Photos. Proton Free gets you one address and up to 1 GB. That is a fifteen-fold difference, and although Gmail’s allowance is shared with other services, it is far more room. If the shared storage fills up completely, Gmail stops sending and receiving and incoming mail bounces back to the sender, so it is not unlimited, but 1 GB is genuinely tight if you keep everything.
Search. This is the most common complaint reported by people who move to Proton, and I share it. Gmail has years of refinement and detailed search operators for sender, recipient, date, label, attachment type and much more. Proton’s search relies on an index stored locally on your device, which makes it less consistent across devices and less capable on a large archive. If you have a decade of mail and you search it constantly, I think you will notice this immediately.
Spam filtering. Gmail filters spam, phishing and malware automatically and requires no configuration, and in my experience it does it very well. Ironically, the automated processing that makes Gmail less private is also what makes its filtering so good.
The Google ecosystem. Gmail is deeply tied to Calendar, Drive, Docs, Meet and Chat. Leaving Gmail often means leaving that ecosystem, which is a bigger job than changing an email address. Proton has its own Calendar, Drive and Pass, but people who switch consistently report Proton Calendar as more basic and contact syncing as a real gap.
Desktop mail apps. Gmail supports IMAP, POP and SMTP directly, so any free account can connect to Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Proton requires Proton Mail Bridge, which needs a paid plan. A free Proton account cannot use a normal desktop mail client at all. That is a genuine disadvantage.
Offline access and big inboxes. Gmail works offline in Chrome, and its bulk tools handle very large or heavily automated inboxes better. Users who process thousands of messages report finding Proton’s bulk tools inadequate for that workload.
Verdict on features: Gmail, comfortably.
Where Proton wins
Proton’s case is narrower and, if it applies to you, decisive.
It cannot decrypt your stored mail. Zero-access encryption means Proton does not hold the key to your stored message bodies and attachments, so it cannot disclose readable copies of them. This is the reason I use it. Not because Proton is more virtuous than Google, but because virtue is not required. It is worth being precise here: this protects the contents of your stored mailbox from provider access and from legal demands made to Proton. It is not a claim that any system is unbreakable, and your own password, device and two-factor settings still matter.
Automatic encryption between Proton users. No PGP setup, no keys to manage. It just happens.
No advertising business model. Proton is funded by subscriptions. It says it does not serve ads in Proton Mail, sell user data, or scan your inbox to build advertising profiles. Proton AG is based in Geneva, overseen by the non-profit Proton Foundation, and its Mail apps are open source and independently audited.
Aliases and domains. Paid plans include custom domains and hide-my-email aliases, which are forwarding addresses that hide your real inbox. Use one per shop or newsletter and disable it when it starts attracting spam.
Proton is not the only provider built this way. Tuta encrypts even more of your mailbox, including subject lines, though it will not work with Outlook or Thunderbird at all.
Verdict on privacy model: Proton. Matching it would require Google to change the encryption model of consumer Gmail, not merely improve its interface or add another inbox feature.
Proton’s honest limits
Proton is not blind to everything. It can access sender and recipient addresses, subject lines, attachment filenames, timestamps and the IP address an incoming message arrived from, and it scans ordinary incoming external mail for spam and viruses before encrypting it for storage. Subject lines are not end-to-end encrypted; they are encrypted while stored, but Proton’s systems handle them first. What it cannot read is the encrypted bodies and attachments of your stored mail, which is the part that matters most and the part Gmail does not protect from Google at all. Ordinary mail to outside providers is not end-to-end encrypted, as covered above. And the storage, search and desktop-client trade-offs are real.
One thing to know before you test it: Proton deletes free accounts after a year of inactivity. You need to sign in and use any Proton service at least once every twelve months. Proton sends reminder emails 30, 15 and 7 days before deletion, but once an address is deleted it generally cannot be recovered or reassigned. Paid accounts are exempt entirely. If you open a free account to try Proton and then drift back to Gmail, set a calendar reminder, or you may lose the address permanently.
So which should you use?
Gmail wins on storage, search, spam filtering, ecosystem, desktop clients and offline access. Proton wins on whether a company can read your mail, and on what a warrant can extract from it.
That is six categories to two, and I still recommend Proton, because those two are not features. They are the structure of the thing. Google can ship better search tomorrow. Matching Proton’s provider-blind storage would mean changing the encryption model of consumer Gmail itself, and Google has not chosen to do that.
So my honest advice: if privacy is any part of why you are reading this, use Proton. Proton Free costs nothing, so you can run it alongside Gmail for a month and find out whether the weaker search and smaller storage actually bother you. Keep Gmail running, move your important accounts over gradually, and decide with real experience rather than an article.
Proton is also not the only option worth knowing about if you are leaving Gmail, though it is the one I use.
And if you got to the end of this and genuinely do not care that Google is able to read your email, that is a legitimate position held by billions of people. Gmail is a superb product. Stay where you are, switch on two-factor authentication, and spend your effort elsewhere.
The question was never which is the better email service. It is whether you would rather your provider promised not to read your mail, or was unable to.